Night Nurse

Night Nurse is a prime example of pre-Code Hollywood. Released in 1931 (after a 22-day shoot by William Wellman) it's lurid and saucy, and also has a bizarre sense of humor mingled with violence.

Barbara Stanwyck is Lora Hart, who joins a hospital as a nursing student. In the early part of the film, the tone is comic, as she and her roommate, Joan Blondell, engage in some hijinks (such as an intern leaving a skeleton in Stanwyck's bed) and treating bootleggers for bullet wounds (one of them, Ben Lyon, becomes enamored of Stanwyck).

But at the halfway point, the film makes a melodramatic turn. Stanwyck graduates from school (in a scene that recalls novitiates taking the veil) and is assigned night duty for a rich woman, taking care of her two daughters, who are suffering from anemia. Stanwyck quickly surmises that the girls are being starved to death. The doctor in charge is a twitchy scoundrel who is in league with the real villain--the chauffeur, played with supreme reprehensibility by Clark Gable.

The film makes little sense, but it's fun to watch, particularly the clashes between Stanwyck and Gable, who is only missing a moustache to twirl. The girls' mother, Charlotte Merriam, has some delectable drunk scenes (she is introduced to us sprawled out on a bear-skin rug, a champagne glass in her hand), especially the one in which she repeats, "I'm a dipsomaniac and proud of it!"

Since it's pre-Code, there are also gratuitous shots of female flesh. Stanwyck is called on to undress to her skivvies at least three times. And the depiction of Lyon is extremely bizarre. He is a bootlegger, but is also the hero of the picture. He gallantly breaks into a Jewish deli to steal milk for the girls, confronts Gable and forces him out of the apartment at gunpoint, and then, in an ending that would never wash after the enforcement of the Code, he kills Gable ("takes him for a ride"), telling Stanwyck she won't be seeing him anymore while they have a light-hearted comic moment in his car.

As with other Wellman pictures of this period, he has taken standard fare and done his level best to make it interesting, using some interesting compositions and a moving camera. The film opens and closes with a point-of-view shot from the inside of a speeding ambulance.